The company and its joint venture partner Sigfeld Group are seeking a permit to abolish a nearly empty 110-year old building on 125th and Frederick Douglass Boulevard. They’re planning to build a retail complex on the site which had been stalled due to lack of financing and litigation involving five tenants who sued the developers alleging unfair relocation tactics. They eventually came to a settlement for more than $1 million two years ago. Read More »

Big news from Reit World: Apartment giant Archstone, one of the largest REITs to be privatized, could go public again. That’s the word from Chief Executive R. Scot Sellers, who spoke on a star-studded panel that also included apartment operator AvalonBay’s Bryce Blair and investment firm Cohen & Steers’ Martin Cohen.

“We’ve told [the owners] for a while that we felt, management felt, this is a very logical way to monetize their investment,” Mr. Sellers said. “That’s a really logical exit.”

There’s no timeline. Still, should it happen anytime soon, interest would be high: Investors have grown quite bullish on the apartment sector, which is seeing strong occupancy and, in some areas, increased rents. Such a move could also allow Archstone easier access to development capital, which has been limited for private operators. Read More »

The real-estate securities industry has descended on Midtown Manhattan for the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts’ annual fall conference, dubbed REIT World, and the signposts on the blocks around the Waldorf-Astoria hotel are draped in banners that say: “Celebrating 50 years of REITs.”

What exactly happened 50 years ago? In 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed into law the Cigar Excise Tax Extension, which contained the REIT Act, allowing people to invest in commercial real estate by buying into a company rather than having to actually purchase a shopping center or office building. REITs didn’t gain widespread popularity until the early 1990s when overleveraged private landlords went public to avoid going bust. (See NAREIT’s industry timeline.) Today, scores of REITs trade on public stock exchanges, from giant shopping mall landlords like Simon Property Group to self-storage facility owners like U-Store-It Trust.

REITs are still fighting for more mainstream acceptance, however. Consider the brief interview with Green Street Advisors’ director of research Mike Kirby featured on NAREIT’s homepage. Mr. Kirby laments that institutional investors like pension funds “continue to fool themselves that these other vehicles are a closer proxy to real estate” than REITs. Read More »